Professor
Paul Freston, first-ever holder of the Gary and Henrietta Byker
Chair in Christian Perspectives on Political, Social and Economic
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Soon into his tenure
as a professor at Calvin College, Paul Freston had an unexpected opportunity.

He had been planning to attend
a conference at Michigan State University on the growth of Christianity
around the world. But when the keynote speaker for the conference was
unable to get to East Lansing because of weather, conference organizers
called Freston in a panic, asking if he could substitute. Which he did.

The last-minute pinch-hit,
says Calvin provost Joel Carpenter, speaks to Freston's abilities and
what he brings to his new duties at the college.

"Paul Freston is one
of the world's leading experts on Latin American evangelical Christianity,"
says Carpenter, "and on evangelicals' public role throughout the
Global South. Christianity is the non-Western world's most dynamic religion,
and Calvin is working hard to understand that dynamism and to partner
with Christians from the southern and eastern nations. We gain a great
deal of strength and wisdom for those tasks by having Professor Freston
working with us."

The Byker
Chair Inauguration will be held on Tuesday, March 2 in the Meeter
Center Lecture Hall and will feature an inaugural lecture by Freston
as well as talks by others, including Rosalind Hackett, of the department
of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, and Timothy
Shah, director of the South Asian Studies Program and a research
fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Shah also co-directs a research project based at the Harvard Academy
for International and Area Studies on "Religion and Global
Politics."

Freston joined
the Calvin faculty this school year as the first-ever holder of the
Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Christian Perspectives on Political,
Social and Economic Thought. And while the title is a mouthful, so too
are both the scope of the new chair's purpose and the breadth and depth
of Freston's expertise.

Consider Freston's book Evangelicals
and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America, a 358-page volume whose
plain title belies the amazing wealth of material contained between
its covers. The book, published by Cambridge University Press, has been
hailed as "a pioneering comparative study of the political aspects
of the new mass evangelical Protestantism of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin
America and parts of Asia."

One reviewer said simply:
"Freston offers keen insights into the intricacies, weaknesses,
strengths, and struggles of indigenous Christians who are seeking to
attain a secure place for themselves and their witness in rapidly changing
countries."

In the book Freston
looks at 27 countries in the three major continents of the Third World.
And not just a cursory glance. He dug deeply into the religious and
political connections in those 27 countries, many of which he visited
and others of which he studied via personal contacts, documentary study
and interviews.

It is that interdisciplinary
sensitivity that made Freston such a good fit for the new Byker Chair,
named for former Michigan State Senator Gary Byker and his wife Henrietta,
parents of current Calvin president Gaylen Byker.

Says Gaylen Byker: "Many
of the most influential thinkers of the modern age have stressed the
interrelatedness of politics, society and the economy. No one discipline
can provide a fully orbed analysis of the complex events, forces and
ideas that sweep across our common life. Interdisciplinary studies,
which link and merge approaches from these disciplines, have added dimensionality
to our understanding of public life. This Chair was established to promote
such study. And we're thrilled that Paul accepted our offer to be the
first holder of the Chair."

The Byker Chair's express
purpose is to "provide a comprehensive, Reformed Christian approach
to the ways in which human interactions and structures are shaped and
influenced by the dynamics of creation, the fall, redemption and historical
development."

That's an important emphasis
for Freston who says the Reformed approach to life always has resonated
with him. For example, Freston says that the implications of evangelical
politics for democracy, nationalism and globalization have great relevance
beyond the Third World. He points to both obstacles and opportunities,
hopeful that many of the evangelical movements may be able to define
a new relationship between religion and the state, one that could pave
the way to greater pluralism and equal treatment of people in countries
throughout the world.

"It is important, in
an increasingly globalized world," says Freston, "that evangelicals
in the developed West learn from the social reality and political concerns
of fellow-evangelicals elsewhere. Within the Third World, awareness
of variety can promote suspicion regarding anyone's claim to have uncovered
a definitive 'biblical politics'; but it can also help local politicians
see that sometimes they defend positions which would be politically
or economically disastrous for their fellow-believers in other parts
of the world."

Freston notes, for example,
that it's very hard to find any Third World evangelicals who supported
the war in Iraq, while, in the United States, evangelicals were solidly
behind the war.

"To many evangelicals
in the Third World," he says, "evangelical politics in the
States is a mystery. There's a totally different geopolitical perspective."

Having lived in Brazil and
traveled to numerous countries for his book, Freston believes that evangelicals
in Third World countries by necessity need to look beyond their borders,
something he says, is more difficult to do when living in an affluent
nation such as the United States.

"People tend
to be less navel-gazing in other parts of the world," he says.
"If you're on the periphery you're aware of both the periphery
and of the center. You perhaps have a slightly broader view of the world."

A broader view of the world
is critical in this day and age Freston says.

"Lack of understanding
of global religious reality can be costly," he says. "If terrorism
is one of the weapons of the weak, we need to know what the religions
of the weak are, and what political options they authorize. Christianity
today is predominantly a non-Western religion and probably the main
religion in the Third World. More of the world's poor are now Christian
than Muslim. So what are their political tendencies? For American Christians
this is an important question not just for 'homeland safety' but also
for international justice."

Such questions
were also a hallmark of Gary Byker, who studied history and sociology
at Calvin despite never having attended high school! He parlayed that
Calvin degree into a career as a successful businessman and politician,
serving in the State Senate from 1968 to 1979.

Freston came to
Calvin after almost two decades in higher education in Brazil, most
recently at Universidade Federal de São Carlos. He is a native
of England who graduated from Cambridge University, with a B.A. degree
emphasizing in Latin American Studies. He received his Masters degree
in history from Cambridge, his Ph.D. degree from University of Campinas
in sociology and did his post-doctoral work at Oxford University. He
also has a master's degree from Regent College in British Columbia and
worked in Brazil with that country's equivalent of Intervarsity Christian
Fellowship.